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The Millennium Comes to Mapumulo: Popular Christianity in Rural Natal, 1866-1906
Abstract
There was more to African religious life in rural colonial Natal than mission orthodoxy, traditionalism, or independent Christianity. Many people became involved in mission Christianity without fully submitting to missionary authority. The story of these 'adherents' has yet to be written, for historians have focused on the prosperous, westernised, orthodox African Christians who lived on Natal's most famous mission stations. In districts like Mapumulo, however, where colonial evangelism seemed to the missionaries to be struggling most, many Africans sought the material and spiritual benefits of colonial evangelism without becoming church members themselves. In fact, missionaries spent more time keeping Africans out of Christianity than dragging or luring them in, as is evident in three episodes in the history of Christianity in colonial Mapumulo. The first episode concerns the first independent church in Natal, which emerged in Mapumulo around 1890, not as a rejection of the missionaries, but rather as a response to their inflexibility. The second episode is about the most successful white evangelist in Mapumulo, who worked on behalf of a mission organisation without being officially involved in it. The mission organisation therefore had no control over his activities, so that he could practice a heterodoxy that, ironically, in a short period aroused among Africans more interest in missionary Christianity than more conventional missionaries had been able to provoke. The third episode is the Poll Tax Rebellion of 1906, in which the missionaries' narrow definition of Christianity obscured the depth of Christian participation and the rebels' appropriations of colonial evangelism. In each case, a world of African Christian activity emerged outside of, but not necessarily in opposition to, the domain of missionary authority. This is not surprising, given the fact that in Mapumulo white missionaries were absent, or at least outnumbered by, black preachers, even in the churches linked to overseas mission organisations.
Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church tells the story of one of the largest African churches in South Africa, Ibandla lamaNazaretha, or Church of the Nazaretha. Founded in 1910 by charismatic faith-healer Isaiah Shembe, the Nazaretha church, with over four million members, has become an influential social and political player in the region. Deeply influenced by a transnational evangelical literary culture, Nazaretha believers have patterned their lives upon the Christian Bible. They cast themselves as actors who enact scriptural drama upon African soil. But Nazaretha believers also believe the existing Christian Bible to be in need of updating and revision. for this reason, they have written further scriptures-a new ‘Bible’- which testify to the miraculous work of their founding prophet, Shembe. Joel Cabrita's book charts the key role that these sacred texts play in making, breaking and contesting social power and authority, both within the church and more broadly in South African public life.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be devoid of “emotions", that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are “useless" in materialising God’s blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.
Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 offers a newly inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms, in tribalisms, Christian assemblies, and other, seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly, concentrating increasingly on the southern highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the ‘Samuelites’. He shows how people's politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed, but never entirely eliminated.
In southern Africa today, as elsewhere, expressions of psychological distress elicit a variety of explanatory frameworks and responses that continue to reflect the different discourses and practices of medicine, magic and religion. The assertion that these positions are historically constructed and contingent is an important theme in the study of healing, both of mind and of body. We know relatively little about African conceptions of mental illness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but in researching the social history of mental health in Natal and Zululand, investigation of one phenomenon - the 'epidemic' of indiki spirit possession in Zululand from the 1890s to 1914 - has proved particularly illuminating. It shows that African concepts of mental illness were in a state of flux at this time as therapies for psychological distress adapted in the face of the entrenchment of colonialism, Christianity and a cash economy. Furthermore, African mental health strategies were not always as inclusive as has sometimes been suggested by scholars. This had very real consequences for a number of women - known as the amandiki - who were tried by the colonial state for the crime of witchcraft between 1894 and 1914. As the ensuing court cases revealed, colonial psychiatry was not simply or necessarily a blunt tool for social control. Instead, changing Western concepts surrounding, and responses to, criminal responsibility and mental illness posed legal problems for the colonial authorities in their attempts to distinguish between witchcraft, hysteria and spirit possession. An exploration of the histories of women and hysteria elsewhere in the world provides possibilities for a new understanding of the actions of the amandiki as attempts to achieve a state of mental health in the context of changing African healing practices.
Twentieth-century Natal and Zululand chiefs' conversions to the Nazaretha Church allowed them to craft new narratives of political legitimacy and perform them to their subjects. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs; throughout the twentieth century, the erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in chiefly praise poems. During this same period, however, new narrative occasions for chiefs seeking to legitimate their power arose in Nazaretha sermon performance. Chiefs used their conversion testimonies to narrate themselves as divinely appointed to their subjects. An alliance between the Nazaretha Church and KwaZulu chiefs of the last hundred years meant that the Church could position itself as an institution of national stature, and chiefs told stories that exhorted unruly subjects to obedience as a spiritual virtue.
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